Raymond Carver and the Shaping Power of the Pacific Northwest Chad Wriglesworth Considering Raymond Carver’s life and work in relationship to place and, more specifically, tothe pacific Northwest, is a fairly recent schol- arly impulse. Carver spent much of his life in small towns through- out Oregon, Washington, and northern California; however, when his writing became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, critics were so pre- occupied with his so-called minimalistic style that they overlooked the shaping power of place in his work. In 1981, for example, critic Donald Newlove reviewed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and called it a collection of “tales from Hopelessville,” giving readers the impression that Carver’s stories are set in generic locations and void of geographic significance (77). The tendency to disassoci- ate carver’s fiction, in particular, from the places he lived and worked has overshadowed scholarly conversations about the author for nearly thirty years. This remains evident in Nicholas o’connell’s book On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature (2003), which barely mentions Carver’s name in relation to the region, and John M. Findlay’s 2006 article, “Something in the Soil?: Literature and regional identity in the 20th-century pacific Northwest,” which dismisses carver’s work from the pacific Northwest on the basis that his stories “tend not to be set in any recognizable Northwest” (180). If it is true—and it may or may not be—that carver’s well-known fiction offers readers little insight into matters of place and regional histo- ries, then moving beyond his most anthologized works toward lesser known stories, poetry, and essays can provide new contexts for dis- cussing carver’s work in relationship to place and, more specifically, to the complex socioeconomic history and transformation of the Pa- cific Northwest. Raymond Carver and the Shaping Power of the Pacific Northwest 19 CI5_RaymondCarver.indd 19 4/25/2013 12:21:34 PM “My Father’s Life”: The Great Depression and Westward Migration raymond carver is among the most influential short-fiction writers of the twentieth century, but his essays and poetry should not be set aside, particularly when it comes to considering his relationship to the pacific Northwest. In an essay titled “my father’s Life,” first published inEs - quire in September 1984, Carver chronicles the westward migration and laboring struggles of his father, a man who arrived in the North- west from Arkansas during the Great depression. When Tess Galla- gher, Carver’s second wife, revisited the essay for its inclusion in the 2001 collection Call If You Need Me, she described it as “one of the most moving expressions on record of a son’s love for his father” (xii). The essay will continue to stand on its own artistic and relational merit, but when considered alongside recent scholarship such Carol Sklenic- ka’s biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2009), William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll’s biographical chronology in Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (2009), and Bob Adelman and Tess Galla- gher’s Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver (2011), readers can begin to grasp ways that Carver’s identity is deeply embedded in the working-class history of the pacific Northwest.1 In Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, Sklenicka traces Carver’s ge- nealogy and the socioeconomic conditions that caused his ancestors to migrate from Arkansas to the pacific Northwest during the Great Depression. Carver’s father, Clevie Carver (1913–67), was born into a family of once-prosperous cotton farmers who had been struggling to endure the socioeconomic reconstruction of the South since the Civil War. economic reconstruction and heavy floods in the South stripped the Carvers of wealth and land, reducing them to “sharecroppers and lumber mill hands” who could be found “migrating from one share- cropping situation to another” (Sklenicka 5). In the early twentieth century, Clevie’s father, Frank, still a teenager at the time, watched his parents, aunts, and uncles lose their land and sink into “further de- privation as the cotton-based Arkansas economy collapsed at the end 20 Critical Insights CI5_RaymondCarver.indd 20 4/25/2013 12:21:35 PM of World War I” (5). For years, the Carvers pressed on as itinerant la- borers, but as Raymond Carver would later explain, by the time the Great Depression hit Arkansas in 1929, his father and extended family were “about to starve down there, and this wasn’t meant as a figure of speech” (Collected 719). Weary of sharecropping and economic uncertainty, Clevie’s older brother, Fred, and his wife headed West, intending to “abandon the economic quagmire of Arkansas” for good (Sklenicka 5). The couple made a cross-country trek to omak, Wash- ington, where Fred took a job with a lumber company in the Okanogan Valley. When the couple wrote back to Arkansas with stories of “para- dise regained,” it fell upon Clevie, only sixteen at the time, to load up an “old, black model-T ford sedan” and drive his mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, and their new baby to the pacific Northwest (5–6). In “My Father’s Life,” Carver speculates that when his father mi- grated to the pacific Northwest he was not “pursing a dream,” but was merely “looking for steady work at decent pay” (Collected Stories 719). This may only be partially true. during the Great depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reform was stirring dreams of westward migration and economic hope. The carvers arrived in the okanogan Valley at an ideal time, just as regional landowners were using the power of irrigation canals and dams to transform the semi- arid landscape into rolling orchards of agricultural prosperity. As histo- rian Carlos Schwantes explains, by the 1920s central Washington was struck with “apple fever” and families like the Carvers were among the earliest migrant laborers to reap the benefits of federally sponsored irrigation (171). clevie also benefited from roosevelt’s commitment to transform the infrastructure of the American West through the con- struction of massive hydroelectric dams. As Carver explains, after ar- riving in the Northwest his father “picked apples for a time” but kept an eye out for bigger and better opportunities and soon “landed a con- struction laborer’s job on Grand Coulee Dam” (Collected Stories 719). By 1935, Clevie’s economic prospects were stable enough to return to Arkansas, where he married a “tall country girl” named Ella Casey Raymond Carver and the Shaping Power of the Pacific Northwest 21 CI5_RaymondCarver.indd 21 4/25/2013 12:21:35 PM and then moved additional family members out to Omak, Washington (Collected Stories 720). Clevie’s sense of optimism was understand- able. President Roosevelt had allotted New Deal funds in excess of six- ty-three million dollars for the construction of Grand Coulee Dam. By the time Clevie and Ella settled down in Omak, in a place “not much bigger than a cabin,” this massive dam was beginning to rise from the dust just fifty miles southeast of their home (Collected Stories 720). Clevie, who became part of a team of more than twelve thousand la- borers, was present at the dam in 1937 when Roosevelt visited the site with words of progress and encouragement. Journalist Richard Neu- berger recalls how the president was the “hero of at least three-fourths of the laborers” at Grand Coulee, men who kept his posters, newspaper clippings, and buttons on display in their bunkhouses (69). Interest- ingly, Clevie was part of a critical minority who “never bragged about his own work at the dam” (Sklenicka 8). According to Carver, his fa- ther was embittered that the president “never mentioned those guys who died building the dam . men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri” (Collected 720). Despite the dangers and ambivalence that came with working on Grand Coulee Dam, Clevie had temporarily improved his economic condition by migrating to the pacific Northwest. decades later, carver would capture his father’s newfound sense of optimism and purpose in a poem titled “photograph of my father in his Twenty-Second Year.” Written one year after Clevie’s untimely death in 1967 and later includ- ed in the essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver imagines his father’s sense of hope through a photograph taken during his early days in Washington State when his father was “still working on the dam” (Collected 720). On the surface, the poem depicts Clevie as an optimistic laborer who ar- rived in the Northwest to reap the benefits ofr oosevelt’s New deal. he leans against the fender of a 1934 Ford, a car he purchased with money earned as a “farmhand-turned-construction worker” and offers the pho- tographer a “sheepish grin” while posing with his young bride (720). In one hand, he holds a bottle of Carlsbad beer, the other a stringer of 22 Critical Insights CI5_RaymondCarver.indd 22 4/25/2013 12:21:35 PM fish—both signs of the good life. he wears a “young man’s face” and poses “bluff and hearty for his posterity” with an “old hat cocked over his ear” (726). But this is not the whole story. As Carver explains in “On Writing,” there is power in absence, in elements that are “left out, that are implied” to the reader (732). And here, even with the sense of youth and promise in the photograph, there are looming indications of “a sense of menace” working beneath what Carver like to call “the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (732).